"When it comes to reading in an emergency . . . comfort seems to be the order of the day — old favorites, regressive pleasures, cozy classics. I am here to champion the opposite: the enlivening, more absorbing distractions of disagreement . . . ; the deep diversion of a good, cleansing quarrel, especially with a book that is game and gleefully provocative. Threshold, a nettlesome new novel — surly, ambitious, frequently annoying — has been my treasured companion of late." - New York Times
"Confidently told . . . The masterly narrative pacing brilliantly counterbalances lurid episodes and sometimes terror with devastating wit and epiphany. As ever, Doyle's prose is compulsively readable, and his insights always credible and occasionally astonishing." - Library Journal (starred review)
"[Threshold] provides one of the wildest experiences you can have without regrets or hangovers. If you long for your misspent youth—or didn't have one—here you go." - Kirkus Reviews
"Rob Doyle . . . is following in the footsteps of his countryman James Joyce by refusing to repeat himself and by pushing his genius beyond ordinary boundaries . . . The book is funny and scary and profoundly compelling . . . Like some 21st century Hemingway with an Irish accent, Doyle is living it up to write it down." - New York Journal of Books
"Written in lyrical prose . . . this tragicomic, introspective, and philosophical work beautifully explores the limits of our understanding." - Booklist
"His best book so far: riddling, irreverent and fearless." - Times Literary Supplement
"A wild, sleazy, drug-filled odyssey . . . Doyle’s maverick novel deserves the accolades coming its way." - Independent
"Dark, misanthropic, provocative; Doyle’s writing really ‘goes there,’ and emerges triumphant." - Irish Times
"Doyle’s musings are always intriguing and often enlightening, offering a glimpse of the anxious yet pleasing rationale of a mind struggling to live in a rational world." - Publishers Weekly
"If this blurb were a movie title it would go like this: Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." - Rachel Kushner, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of THE MARS ROOM
"Threshold is extraordinary, quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s intimate, a revelation in the literal sense of that word, and yet it’s full of curiosity. It’s hit me right in the gut, made me think about my own life and the things that I’ve done in it. It’s fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt. A book that will stay with me for a very long time. Masterful." - John Boyne, author of THE HEART'S INVISIBLE FURIES
"The geographic and intellectual peregrinations of Threshold cover a great deal of terrain: tripping (both the drug and day variety), vast swathes of Europe, reading, loneliness, sex. Rob Doyle’s portrait of the artist as a youngish man, filtered through the sieve of his refined prose, is the modern-day odyssey of a traveler who doesn’t quite have a home to return to except for the expansive vistas of his own roving mind." - Teddy Wayne, author of LONER
"Ecce homo! Threshold is audacious (never more so than when most abject), daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny and – to hurtle to the other end of the alphabet – wonderful. Above all, it’s a highly original attempt to engage, formally, with Nietzsche’s dangerous question: ‘how much truth can one mind [or novel] bear?’ " - Geoff Dyer, author of JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI
"Rob Doyle has outdone himself. Threshold is one of those novels where underlining notable lines would be a very bad idea, as you'd absolutely mangle the paper . . . It's the kind of work you have to come down from—playful, potent, lurid, moving and fearless. I'm sure it'll be bouncing around my head for a long time yet." - Lisa McInerney, author of THE GLORIOUS HERESIES
"This is the type of brilliant, maverick achievement that sets a (young) writer apart. Wonderfully readable and with a skein of black comedy running through it that serves to highlight the seriousness of Doyle’s intent. A Pilgrim's Progress for our time." - Mike McCormack, author of the Booker Prize-longlisted SOLAR BONES
"Threshold is Rob Doyle's best book yet, a thrilling mutation somewhere between novel, essay collection, report, travelogue and confession. Doyle is a Romantic wandering in the post-sublime, a zealot without a cause, and his is a journey you don't want to miss." - Chris Power, author of MOTHERS
"Threshold is about inhabiting the space between the mundane and the sublime . . . Transcendence can certainly be found in things like magic mushrooms . . . but it also be found in love and language, which are themselves gateways and thresholds. This marvelous book knows that and leads us toward them." - Irish Central Review
"Doyle plumbs the bleaker aspects of literary life with startling precision and candor." - New York Times on THIS IS THE RITUAL
"Some literary stars are born in the first paragraph. So it proves with Rob Doyle . . . Each story in this collection leaps to life with an importuning urgency . . . A work of near magic." - Irish Voice on THIS IS THE RITUAL
"Provocative and thrilling." - Geoff Dyer, author of YOGA FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO DO IT on THIS IS THE RITUAL
"Darkly exhilarating . . . God may be dead, but a new literary star is born." - Sunday Times on HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN
"For sheer bravery and for style, for its integrity and vision and uncompromising tone, I . . . admired Rob Doyle's Here Are the Young Men." - Colm Tóibín, The Irish Times, "Best Books of the Year"
2019-12-23
Drug binges, orgies, and techno…oh my!
"For my purposes, a novel is simply a long chunk of prose in which whatever is said to have happened may or may not have actually happened, even if the author doesn't bother to change his own name." So, now that we've got that straight, we can plunge into the experiences of "Rob Doyle" during a 20-year-long Wanderjahr. Irish autofictionist Doyle's (This Is the Ritual, 2017, etc.) third book is a series of vignettes set in Sicily, Paris, Berlin, and beyond, framed by a series of letters to a friend, a woman also writing a book. His Geoff Dyer-esque lack of delusion about himself and his quest makes his report reliably refreshing. In Sicily, surrounded by beautiful women, he is so undone by sexual frustration that he finds relief at the farmers market. "I had the sense, eating those olives that were so plump and juicy that the eating of them was a rapturous, almost a sexual, experience, that I had never really eaten olives before, that the puny, meagre, olive-shaped things I'd bought in jars in Ireland were not so much olives as insults to olives, shameful betrayals of the olive experience." In Kashmir, he isolates himself on a houseboat in order to scientifically study the effects of ketamine. "I imagined I was conducting important research at the limits of consciousness, but I see now I was just getting fucked up on a boat." In Berlin, he dances all night at an immense sex club where "every freak in Europe had apparently converged." As necessary as eating or laughing, dancing gives him "access to a state of unselfconsciousness. There was always someone older or younger, nakeder or weirder than you…." So is he writing "the great backpacker dropout novel" or "the great Berlin techno novel? he wonders. Whatever it is, it provides one of the wildest experiences you can have without regrets or hangovers.
If you long for your misspent youth—or didn't have one—here you go.
